Cassette books.

British To Add Notes To Enhance Classics

When it comes to Things the World Needs, yet another batch of cut-at-the-knees abridged classics doesn't rank high on my list.

In fact, it doesn't even make the list.

But clearly, I'm not in charge of these matters. In the wake of half a dozen or more other companies doing the same thing, a British company is weighing in with its own versions.

Yet these have a novel twist. The company is Naxos Audiobooks, a sister to the Naxos that produces classical music, and Nicolas Soames, head of the company, has more than 800 musical recordings to choose from to "accent," as he puts it, the material.

This makes for some imaginative and satisfying pairings. For Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," Russian to its core, Soames chose Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead." For Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," which spans several centuries, so does the music, ending up with Ravel. There are Gregorian chants for Sir Thomas Mallory's "The Death of Arthur" and Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" for Sir Richard Burton's "The Arabian Nights."

All of the music for James Joyce's "Ulysses" was chosen because it was specifically referred to in the text, including Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" and Mozart's "Don Giovanni."

And what better for "The Great Gatsby" than a Gershwin piano concerto?

(Soames readily admits, however, that "the opportunities for kitch are legion." When he did "War and Peace," he did NOT put Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" to it, "although I must say I was tempted.")

Most of the 75 recordings to date are 2 to 6 hours long and cost from $9.98 to $19.96.

Naturally, only portions of the musical pieces are used, so you might say that is abridged as well. Soames compares music to those scrolly doohickeys at the chapter breaks in printed books. "Music is wonderful for giving that little breather you need," he said, "just to absorb the passage or to absorb the plot or the beauty of the writing."

And these fine recordings seem to prove him right.

To top it all off, Soames was able to attract some excellent readers for his project--most of them with Shakesperean credits.

The only blemish was to pick a native of North Carolina for "Moby Dick." Try as the reader might, he just couldn't quash that accent.

One of my favorite titles was Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," which featured classical Indian music and the voice of Madhav Sharma. I had intended simply to sample it, but wound up listening all the way through.